"What I've tried to do is write a serious book that explores only the existing hard evidence," Temple says. "People might not like it, but I think the burden is now on them to disprove it."Uncovering secrets seems to have been a lifelong forte. As a boy growing up in Kentucky, Temple, who is now 52, knew the original Colonel Sanders - of fried chicken fame - and persuaded him to divulge the key ingredients. "It turned out that the crucial thing was dipping the chicken in milk first.
That and the 13 different herbs he used."This was an early example of Temple's extraordinary capacity for absorbing information. As an expert on China - and it's his status as a respected academic that adds credibility to his Sirius book - Temple read, without taking notes, no fewer than 8.5 million words' worth of research by the scholar Joseph Needham before distilling it all into his book The Genius of China. Indeed, the implications of Chinese development - economically and culturally - concern him much more than little green men."Nobody seems to be coming to terms with what this means," Temple says "We're talking monumental change We need a bridge between Western and Chinese cultures. To the West it's almost as if the Chinese were as strange as aliens."Futurology has surely never sounded so respectable or persuasive. Aliens will return to earth only when advances in space travel enable man to put himself in touch with them, Temple says. He doesn't think the aliens will be hostile - "Why should they be when they've made an ivestment in Earth?" - but that hostility comes from us.
Specifically from the religious fundamentalists for whom such explanations of our origins are most threatening.So does Robert Temple believe in God? "I believe in divine levels of existence I wouldn't want to have to come up with a definition of God. But I'm no atheist."And if The Sirius Mystery doesn't sound like your kind of thing, you could always try the first ever collection in English of the complete Aesop's Fables, to be published by Penguin two weeks later. Translator: Robert Temple (with his wife Olivia).Ever felt your brain was a bit small?MY invitation to readers to nominate the six most memorable images of the century has produced a fascinating and diverse response. Keep them coming, and I'll publish the results in a fortnight. Send your list to: Six, Rex Fontaine, the Independent on Sunday, One Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London E14 5DL.
